Last Friday I went to my friendly neighborhood healthcare facility for a routine physical exam. When I stepped on the scale as part of checking in, I got a surprise.
You see, for over a week I’ve had a nearly insatiable appetite. Everything I eat, no matter how filling or how much, transubstantiates into Chinese food. It started the moment I crossed the finish line at Trail Marathon last weekend, and has not yet let up.
Distance runners call this condition “rungry” and when we’ve got it bad, things can turn ugly. “Never get between a runner and his carbs,” someone said one day when I rather aggressively lunged for a piece of cake after a race.
When it’s really bad, we don’t even use our hands! (Actually from a Pi Day race.)
But with me, being rungry is infrequent and unpredictable. After the Potawatomi Trail 50 last month, I wasn’t all that hungry. I even had a sore mouth and throat that made eating difficult for a couple of days. (I’ve since learned it was likely due to a very dry mouth from long hours breathing hard.)
Trail Marathon Weekend, with 39.3 miles over two days, was a different animal. Chocolate chip cookie? Don’t mind if I do. Oh look, that one’s broken, gotta clean that up. And that one, too. That evening at D&D I ate my usual excessive amount, and things have continued like that since.
Okay, so what weight do I want to be? That depends on what race is coming up. For shorter distances (5K to marathons) I aim for a “race weight” of about 158 lbs. For ultras I like to be a few pounds heavier, since speed isn’t critical and they create a large caloric deficit. So for taper week before TMW (which I train for like an ultra) I tried to eat more while cutting back on exertion. Recovery week was also light on exercise, so that plus heavy appetite should have equaled some weight gain.
And yet the scale at the health center read 155 lbs. Ultra prep eating, plus a week of being “rungry” and I’m underweight! I didn’t weigh myself before TMW, so I don’t know what my pre-race weight actually was. It’s possible I was even lower, which could explain why I was low on gas the final miles on Sunday.
So what now? For one, I’ve stopped worrying about my appetite. I’ll let my body tell me how much to eat, as long as I feed it the right stuff, of course. And I think I’ll start charting my weight on a weekly basis. Not for diet control, but to see if I’m at the right weight for what I’m training for. With my focus this year shifting to getting faster at short distances, I need all the data I can get.
Gotta go. Hungry again.
You have no idea how hard this is.
Oh, and my height is down from my historical six feet to 5-11 ½. I have been drinking more coffee lately. I guess Mom was right.
